☰Amman Citadel

The highest hill in the old city, inhabited for more than seven thousand years and still topped with the ruins of successive civilisations stacked on top of one another: the six standing columns of the Roman Temple of Hercules, a 6th-century Byzantine church, and the extraordinary vaulted reception hall of the 8th-century Umayyad Palace, whose wooden dome was reconstructed by archaeologists in 1998. The small on-site museum holds the 9,500-year-old Ain Ghazal figures. Come at sunset for the view over the old city and the Roman Theatre below.